Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Throught The Years: Two Centuries of Writing

Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Throught The Years: Two Centuries of Writing by Daws, Gavan. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781566478434.

Hawaii has never seen a book like this! Honolulu Stories runs over one thousand pages and features the work of over 270 authors, and over 350 selections. It brings together two hundred years of writing and literary history about the town a rich feast of words including short fiction, excerpts from novels, scenes from plays, poems, chants, song lyrics, cartoons, stand-up comedy, and the modern art of slam poetry. The story of Honolulu comes alive; from its origins as a tiny village, to raucous whaling port and capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, to multicultural metropolis flanked by Waikiki on one end and Pearl Harbor at the other. The myriad of authors featured run the gamut from the world-famous, to locally beloved, to unknown. There are Hawaiian chanters whose names are forever lost, but whose words live on. A roving journalist who called himself Mark Twain; a deserter from a whaling ship who went to work on the waterfront in 1843 Herman Melville; Rap Reiplinger, the genius of Hawaiian stand-up comedy; Jack London, the first ever to include the sport of surfing in short stories; Lois Ann Yamanaka, who did the impossible and took pidgin English to a national level; Korean political exiles; a Portuguese poet in a mom-and-pop store; school kids; a man in prison; a ninety-year-old woman still composing tanka... The human range of the voices included is infinite and the pleasures found within are endless.